Decrepit Old Fool

This week I saw an ad in sidewalk chalk that read; “Humanism” and giving a time and place on campus.  Thinking that perhaps a Humanist group was getting started, I attended the meeting, which turned out to be a lecture sponsored by a local church.

The speaker was an anti-Humanist twit and “defender of the Gospel” named Steve Wolfgang.  (I’m not giving him a link; you can Google him yourself if you want).  This was the last of four lectures in which he denounced Humanism, science, reason, technology, and in particular, evolution.

I have a message for you, Church Of Christ in Normal, Illinois: you spent money on a speaker who is either ignorant or a liar, or more likely both.  When he says that there’s no explanation for the evolution of the eye, he’s simply wrong, either accidentally or on purpose. When he says there are no journal papers on molecular evolution, he’s either ignorant or lying.  When he trots out that “teach the controversy” nonsense for schools, he’s ignoring an awful lot of myths.  He failed to let you know that Michael Behe is a laughingstock in the biology community.

It’s difficult for me to think he is being honest in attacking the classic “peppered moth” evolution example; despite its methodological problems the original study on peppered moths has been completely vindicated.  The follow-on study was so widely reported that Wolfgang would have to be very careful where he looked to avoid it.  His ignorance, if he is ignorant, is purposeful.

Macro- versus micro-evolution?  Seriously?  Let me ask you; don’t millions of small steps add up to a long journey?  He says “we don’t see changes from one kind into another” but he’s being very careful not to see it.  Read Richard Dawkins’ Climbing Mount Improbable, or River Out Of Eden.

Is he really discussing morphology and “missing links” without having read Neil Shubin’s Your Inner Fish?  Maybe I should give lectures on the historical development of Jazz – a subject about which I know nothing.  Maybe if I learned some key words I could make it sound as if I did, though.

When he says that humanism, science and technology issued in more slaughter in the 20th century than at any time in human history, has he done the math?  Or is he just making assumptions?  Because Stephen Pinker did the math and the 20th, even with its world wars, was less violent than centuries that preceded it.  There is considerable evidence that violence and sadism is less acceptable now than it was 200 years ago.

One person in the audience tried to ask what sounded like honest questions about the evolution of the eye, but Wolfgang steered them into a rhetorical twist.  Someone asked me later if I spoke up with the right explanation; I can debate reasonably well in writing but I’m not fast on my feet, and really don’t enjoy confrontation, so no, I didn’t.  I’d have paid real money for an evolutionary biologist with a bad attitude to be in the audience though.

The paragraphs above only cover one index card worth of Wolfgang’s stupidity (or duplicity) but in the one hour that he spoke, I filled two cards on both sides.  It was a hit parade of busted canards and all I can tell you is that if it makes you feel good to spend your money on a guy like that, knock yourself out.  But don’t be fooled.

The funniest part of the hour was when he lamented that humanists often mock creationists as “idiotic” or “stupid”.  Sad, yes, but there’s a reason: creationists keep spouting the same old lies decade after decade.  They may dress them up with new labels like “Intelligent Design” but it’s the same old ignorant junk. 

I’m certainly not sorry to have missed the first three lectures.  It isn’t difficult to figure out why the church is attacking Humanism, though; when your religion is based on mythological inerrancy, scientific rot is all you’ve got.  It’s sad that a church paid to come on campus and tell lies about a minority that they find inconvenient.  But they really didn’t have to do that: I just checked, and there are twenty religious Registered Student Organizations on campus, but none for atheism or humanism. 

Might be time to change that.

NOTES:

• Here’s a more complete list of canards that he managed to present in just a single hour:
  • Peppered moth data “cooked” and “at the end of the day, you still have peppered moths”.  (The study was vindicated, and how about at the end of several hundred thousand days?)

  • Behe: mousetrap, flagellum, eye.  “Zero” journal articles explain how eye could appear on molecular level. (Just not true)
  • Old textbooks are sometimes wrong, and occasionally wrong information makes it into recent textbooks.  (You can thank the TBOE for most of that, but in any case science does, through a rancorous process, make its corrections.  As opposed to religion which started out being wrong about almost everything and has kept a perfect record.)
  • No “Tree Of Life” exists.  (Right.  It’s more like a tangled bank, we already know that.  But there are tracable lines of common descent, which appear in the morphological, fossil, genetic, and molecular evidence.)
  • “Since we have eyes, what happened to creatures with almost-eyes?” (Eyes evolved independently something like eight times.  You can find every stage of eye evolution just within currently extant members of the mollusca family.)
  • Upset at being identified as idiot, LOL
  • “Statement of doubt signed by over 400 scientists” (Please… 400 scientists?  That’s not many considering that over 500 scientists named Steve have signed a counter-statement, and that your list is mostly comprised of people – many not scientists at all – with no relevant expertise in biology)
  • Humanism responsible for slaughter in 20th century (Let’s be honest here: humanity is responsible for slaughter in every century)
  • Teach the controversy is “Academic integrity 101” (No it isn’t, and that ignores a lot of myths)
  • Say; “Prove it!” to evolutionists! (But won’t accept any evidence as proof.  And anyway, proof is a mathematical concept; science deals in probabilities)
  • Scientific naturalism and supernaturalism are equal and both require faith. (Not sure what definition of “faith” he’s using, but try getting a new scientific model accepted without evidence and see what happens)
  • Haeckel’s embryo illustrations “fraud” with cherry-picked Gould quotes (Really?  Not exactly keeping up with the literature, are we?  Yes Haeckel had it wrong but that isn’t news.  Find out something about “Evo-Devo” and get back to us.)
  • Micro- vs. Macro-evolution with regard to finches, moths, horses, and dogs.  “We don’t see large scale changes of one kind into another”.  (Seriously man, if you want to walk to South America, it’s going to take a lot of steps.  Watching any ten minutes of that journey won’t give you any idea of its duration and scale.)
  • Houses have designers, and so do mousetraps and airplanes!  (Right.  So all similar-looking things must have designers.)

• Here’s Joss Whedon on Humanism.  W00T!